UKC

For most of my life I've not been much of a reader but I've really gotten into it over the last couple of years.

Can you recommend me some of your favouite outdoor/adventure reads?

I find it really hard to get into some of the dryer classics - it took me over a year to read the worst journey in the world, and while a short and quite easy read, I had to force myself to get through Sailing alone around the world  - whereas I've found some other books I've read recently impossible to put down (Andy Kirkpartick's books, Into the wild, North to the Night, Tony Bullimore's Saved, Close to the wind).

I've a copy of "Down the great unknown" on my bedside table ready to go but I fear it will be a chore.

What would you recommend to me?

It's not exactly modern but Eric Newby's The Last Grain Race is extremely readable and certainly adventurous.

Obligatory Touching The Void, I'd describe it as technical rather than dry.

Thanks, I’ll see if I can pick up a copy of the grain race on eBay. 

Have read (and listened to on audio book, and watched the film) Touching the Void. Great read (I can still hear the audiobook narrator’s “JJOOooOoOOoOOoeeEEee” as I drift off to sleep 🤣)

I'm enjoying "barbarian days" a surfing and travelling book. I also enjoyed "travels" by Michael Crichton. 2 out of field suggestions although I'm not sure how easy it will be to find either of them! 

At long last just finished 'Tears of the Dawn' by Jules Lines. Recommended.

I'm currently reading Jon Waterman's book about kayaking the Northwest Passage ('Arctic Crossing') after reading 'In the Shadow of Denali', which was sublime. Both fantastic, but the latter is probably more accessible.

+1 on Jules Lines' book; also recently reread Steve House's and Barry Blanchard's memoirs ('Beyond the Mountain' and 'The Calling respectively).

And if you've not read 'Mountains of My Fear' by David Roberts, you should rectify this immediately!

If you can find it, The Great Days by Walter Bonatti is an essential read. It remains the only mountaineering book that has actually induced in me a feeling of vertigo and exposure, while tucked up in bed.

A walk in the woods by Bill Bryson.  

Learning to breathe by Andy Cave. An engaging story, but also really well written which makes it an easy read. 

By chance I found an old paperback copy of 'Alone to Everest' First edition (1954) by Earl Denman. I have to admit I'd never heard of him before. 

Describes his approach march and attempt to climb Everest in 1947 with Tenzing Norgay. (BEFORE his first ascent with Hillary) and before an Alpine style of climbing. 

Try Philip Ayres biography of Douglas Mawson - 'Mawson- a life. '

Everyone's heard of Scott, Amundsen et al, but Mawson not so much.  What he did was mind boggling - Scoot and the rest went for the South Pole - he was exploring the perimeter in essence, with bonkers distances and trials beyond measure

Between A Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston is a good read.

Nepal Himalaya by HW Tilman, sublime...

I found the diary of Shackleton's 1908 Nimrod expedition on my parents' bookshelf, in which Mawson featured prominently. I enjoyed all the quiet understatement of these characters hauling vast sledges, falling into crevasses and getting dysentery quite calmly.

Barrow's Boys by Fergus Fleming

The description is about right  "A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude, and Outright Lunacy"

I shan't spoil it, but so many elements of Mawson's story are just extraordinary. Combine Doug Scott on the Ogre, Touching the Void and Rob Taylor/Henry Barber on the Breach Wall and you're still not close.  Shackleton's big day out is comparable but different.  Frankly, contemporary sat phone accompanied exploration is a completely different world.  No chance of saying, "We have just xxxxx".  "Don't worry - someone will be along soon - might be a week or so - is that OK?"  

More like,

"We have just xxxxx.  How long is it going to take us to get to the ship now?"

"A couple of months, maybe three.  Bit of a shame that we xxxxxxx.  Might make it a bit of a challenge" 

"When does the sea freeze for the winter and the ship sail away?"

"A couple of months, maybe three"

"How much food have we got?"

"Not that much.  Do you like dog?"

I also often struggle to engage with some well-regarded climbing books. However, I seem to remember really enjoying High Infatuation by Steph Davis. It was a few years ago since I read it, maybe I should pick it up again...

Mason's own book is a good read as well!

+1.  An outstanding read. Coupled with Channel 4 documentary- Ghost ship.

Loving the user name! Easy reads

Andy Kirkpatrick - Psycho Vertical and Joe Simpson Touching the Void

Add to that Nanda Devi. I think it was this one where Tillman got a telegram in Africa and cycled across Africa to catch a boat to India. Epic.

Desperate Voyage by John Caldwell. At the close of WW2 he sails a ramshackle little yacht across the Pacific without any prior experience. Just to get to Australia and see his girl. He has a cat and the whole story is astounding.

The Darkness Beckons by Martyn Farr. A history of cave diving as riveting as the space race and as dangerous.

Jack Olsen’s ‘A Climb Up To Hell’

A compelling tale of Corti’s attempt and subsequent rescue on the Eiger North Face. And a great antidote to Harrer’s more self centred ‘White Spider’

Diving into darkness by Philip finch. 

Not light reading, but an absorbing read about scuba diving at the very limits. 

Also by Eric Newby and very good. From wiki:

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is a 1958 book by the English travel writer Eric Newby. It is an autobiographical account of his adventures in the Hindu Kush, around the Nuristan mountains of Afghanistan, ostensibly to make the first mountaineering ascent of Mir Samir. Critics have found it comic, intensely English, and understated. 

Ha. Cheers. It’s an Ali G reference. 

Ticked both of those off. I’ve read all of Andy K’s books. Including the big technical manuals. Absolutely fantastic reads. Really enjoy his sense of humour and lack of any preference and ego

Echoes by Nick Bullock. 

Kiss or Kill by Mark F Twight - this is a collection of articles and short pieces.

Might look that up. I've read loads of these kinds of things over decades but never kept a record nso can't often recall name or author. It sounds like something I read years ago about an American deep diver who specialises in wrecks including the big liner that sank in the St Lawrence River, sister of the Lusitania I think? He has an Asian Indian surname though. Nearly died diving a U-boat.

One of the classic climbing autobiographies that hasn't been mentioned yet is Paul Pritchard's Deep Play - it's one of the few I've read twice. For a very different take on the climbing life, his follow up, The Totem Pole, is a visceral account of his life-changing fall and its aftermath. He actually signed my copy on the 10th anniversary of my own bad fall - serious enough to put me in hospital but a bit of a graze in comparison to his! I find him a real inspiration. 

“Adventure” is surprisingly not a genre I really get on with (but in fairness I am a lazy reader all round) but I really enjoyed A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols. You mentioned sailing in the OP so maybe you’ll like it. Weirdly, a good companion book is Moon Dust by Andrew Smith even if this is drifting off topic a bit. There are little parallels between the 1968 global circumnavigation race, and the Apollo moon shots; Nichols alludes to this quite nicely .

Agree with Deep Play, seems widely to be lauded as one of the very best mountaineering books.

For some fairly old fashioned unorthodox adventure you might try something by Gavin Maxwell; Harpoon at a Venture for example about his Soay based basking shark fishery after the war. Or at a similar time frame, Gerald Durrell of My Family and Other Animals fame wrote some great little books (MFaOA for one) about his animal collecting exploits post WW2 - The Bafut Beagles was a good one. 
Both of those suggestions are page turners. Some of the practices therein would horrify 21st century ecologists and environmentalists no doubt, but it was a different time of course and both authors went on to influence much good in those fields as I understand it.

Writing about Totem Pole, I should have said Pritchard suffered a catastrophic accident, not fall.

I've been reading some of Bernard Moitessier's books about his sailing adventures recently. I've got to the end of several, so they can't be too bad, although I wouldn't categorise them as favourites I did enjoy them. Some books that come to mind adventure-wise, but in the sense of adventures people are forced to undertake are Papillon, Banco, and Guillotine Sèche (dry guillotine), although it's believed there was some artistic licence used in the writing of the first two. The recent Papillon film is complete rubbish compared to the book, so don't be swayed by that. Also The Long Walk (Rawicz NOT King). 7 years in Tibet I recall was good, too. I won't recommend any climbing/mountaineering books as others have made plenty of good suggestions.

Great thread!

I found The Great Climbing Adventure by John Barry a fun read. Anything by HW Tilman is great, his sense of humour and understated way of writing appeals to me. The Sea and the Snow by Philip Temple is a well written account of an amazing voyage from Australia to a remote Antarctic island to climb a volcano.

I can only endorse Tlouth7's choices.

The last Grain Race and Touching the void were both books I never wanted to put down and never wanted to end.

My own addition to his would include a book I can't part with even after 45 years of sitting on the shelf:-,

"No Picnic On Mount Kenya".  a climbing book with a difference.  Its by Felice Benuzzi an Italian WW2 prisoner of war in Kenya and is the story of how he, and a number of other bored Italian ex mountaineers/climbers made in secret, enough kit & clothing to climb Mount Kenya - Oh, yes they had to escape the camp to do it, and later returned to give themselves up.

The Blind Watch Maker by......?  Is much more modern, and I thought an fascinating read about how every creature and plant on earth came about by millions of years of 'accidents', rather than design

It might help if you said what kind of subject matter you enjoy reading.  

Thoroughly agree with No picnic on Mount Kenya.

In a different field, The Darkness Beckons by Martin Farr is an extraordinary account of the rational unhinged.

Hugh Thompson ; ' Nanda devi'. Great book, following in footsteps of Shipton to Nanda Devi Sanctuary, Also-Eric Newby- 'short walk in the Hindu Kush', great eccentric book. Herzog's Annapurna-account of first accent, Boardman Tasker Omnibus- 3 books -Savage Arena- Shining mountain and Sacred Summits.

Anything by Redmond OHanlon, Eric Newbury, Norman Lewis, Wilfred Thesiger, Sebastian Junger or Jon Krakauer (though he seemed unduly judgmental of one of the guided in Into Thin Air)

Occupational Hazards and The Places in Between by Rory Stewart 

Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Last Man Off; can’t remember the author

Matt Lewis for this. Yes, a great read. That reminds me of a book I read about the last survivor of the Fastnet disaster. He survived by talking to his dead mate. Can't remember author either!

Found it: The Last Dive by Bernie Choudhury

Left for Dead by Nick Ward

Two against the Ice by Ejnar Mikkelsen. An expedition to Greenland where they missed their boat and had to walk to a fishing port.

The chapters increase in intensity until having eaten their dogs, having their teeth fall out due to scurvy and getting frostbitten the next chapter is entitled "things get worse"! Unputdownable.

This is a great thread! Lots of new books to hunt for. 

Mine are a bit more walking and landscape focussed (probably because I’m more of a runner and walker than a climber 🙂). I’d recommend  Mike Cawthorne ‘Hell of a Journey’, Nan Shepherd ‘’The Living Mountain‘ and Gwen Moffat ‘Space Below My Feet. 
 

I also  like Robert Macfarlane’s writing. As well as ‘Mountains of the Mind’, I’d recommend ‘The Old Ways’ and  ‘The Wild Places’. 
 

Perhaps not the outdoor book you might have thought of, but why not try 'Skyfaring' by Mark Vanhoenaker, which I am reading now. The author is a 747 pilot and writes beautifully. He travels the world, seeing and thinking of it as you would from the sky, giving the reader a sense of the scale of places - Algeria is a two hour country, Belgium, just 15 minutes and of the emptiness of much of the earth. Besides the oceans, Canada, Siberia and Greenland just go on and on, with no human habitation to be seen. He gives out lots of interesting details from the flyers perspective, such as that the original 747s had a place where the sextant was kept, pre GIS days, and how, for jet flyers, the world is divided not so much onto sea and land ,but into where there is civilian radar cover and where, which is for the most part, there is not.

A popular but engaging complement to this is The Simple Science of Flight by Henk Tennekes, which explains why the 747 was the logical crossing point of the engineers' and the bean counters' trains of thinking.

I've just dug out

Wings On my Sleeve by Eric 'Winkle' Brown. The greatest test pilot who ever lived.

Empire of the Clouds by James Hamilton-Paterson. Britain's amazing postwar jet programme.

Impossible Journey by Michael Asher. Him and his missus make the first crossing of the Sahara (west to east not the easy south-north way).

The Fearful Void by Geoffrey Moorhouse. An earlier attempt at the same crossing. I named a route after it.

More recently, I read Asher's story about joining the Paras around about the time they were being deployed into N. Ireland. He underwent a complete turnaround in his attitudes: Shoot to Kill. A soldier's journey through violence.